SEO Movers & Shakers in 2012

New Year is round the corner and SEOs are busy making strategies and resolutions (err avoid black hat?) for 2013. But before we do that lets rewind 2012 to take note of Movers & Shakers of the year and our lessons for 2013.

Following list of SEO changes were observed during 2012:

What Happened in 2012?

1. Google Panda

This year Google Panda has been updated 13 times which has majorly impacted websites having:

• Duplicate Content in high volume
• Poor quality inbound links
• Too many irrelevant ads above the fold
• Keyword Stuffing

2. Google Penguin

Google Penguin was launched later in April 2012 to keep a check on web spamming. The following spam factors are being monitored by Penguin:

• Spam blog comments
• Black hat link building schemes
• Exact Match Domains e.g. (xyz.com, xyz.org, xyz.net, xyz.other)
• Exact Match Anchor Text
• Keyword stuffing

3. Increased Focus on Reputation & Trust

Reputation here refers to the credibility of website’s content, design, and external links. Google, Bing, and other search engines liked and promoted consistent quality of reputed and trusted websites whereas others lost their SEO value.

4. Increased Communication via Webmaster Tools

In the first two months of the year, Google sent out 700K warnings via Webmaster Tools to websites notifying them for their black hat links.

5. Decreased Organic Search Listings per Page on Google

It was noticed that Google was displaying less than usual 10 results on some SERPs since April 2012. The % of SERPs was 1-4% initially, later it jumped to 18% in August 2012.

6. Infographic & Guest Blogging Links

In July, Matt Cutts said that Google may discount the value of links generated by infographics. The same way they did with widgets.
A similar warning was given to guest bloggers in Oct 2012.

7. Indexing iFrame Content

iFrame links/content is now being indexed by Google. Also it was observed that iFrame links/content is not visible in the text only version of the cached copy of Google.

Based on these changes, we have also listed down the key points to follow during 2013:

What to Do in 2013?

1. Google Panda

• Create original and error free content
• Always link from an authoritative source
• Avoid displaying excessive ads
• Avoid keyword stuffing & maintain a keyword density of 3-4%

2. Google Penguin

• Avoid hidden text/links
• Avoid cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially the same content
• Create unique and relevant content that drives a user to visit your site first
• Avoid keyword stuffing & maintain a keyword density of 3-4%

3. Increased Focus on Reputation & Trust

Need to focus on the content, design, and external links loved by search engines & users, avoiding duplicity.

4. Increased Communication via Webmaster Tools

Regularly monitor your Webmaster Tools & follow the instructions recommended by Google.

5. Decreased Organic Search Listings per Page on Google

Regularly check SERP ranking for your targeted keywords for their positions especially when they are ranking in the range of 6-10.

6. Infographic & Guest Blogging Links

• Infographics are a hit if considered from a user perspective. But if they will get discounted by Google, they will add no value to SEO.
• Guest Blogging if done using white hat techniques will be rewarding.

7. Indexing iFrame Content

• It is recommended not to use iFrame as it is not being indexed by other search engines like Bing & Yahoo.
• But at critical times, where it cannot be avoided, it is recommended to host the iFrame content on the same domain rather than hosting it on a sub domain or a cross domain.

Penguin 2.0 Losers: Porn Sites, Game Sites, & Big Brands Like Dish.com & The Salvation Army

Google’s fourth Penguin update — what the company is calling Penguin 2.0 — hit last night, and less than 24 hours later we’re already getting a first chance to look at what sites might be considered “losers” in terms of search visibility.
 
In a nutshell, the list includes: porn sites, game sites and big brands like Dish.com, the Salvation Army, CheapOair and Educational Testing Service (yes, ETS, the company that makes a lot of those standardized tests you probably took as a child).

The SEO software company, SearchMetrics, has just shared its initial look at what sites have been affected the most by the latest Penguin update. As always, SearchMetrics is using its “SEO Visibility” benchmark, which looks at the visibility of a company’s web pages as they appear (or don’t appear) across a wide range of keywords in Google’s search results.

Here’s their initial list of the 25 biggest Penguin 2.0 losers:

There are eight porn sites on the list of 25, and four game-related sites. Of those game sites, three are listed in the top 10. (You have to merge the porn sites listed at the bottom with the sites above them to get the actual order of impact.)

There are also several well-known brands, like Dish.com, the Salvation Army, ETS, and CheapOair. REEDS jewelers has been around since 1946 and has stores in 18 states. DailyDot.com, also on the list, is a respected online news site.

The column on the far right shows how much “SEO Visibility” each website has lost — at least for the keywords that SearchMetrics tracks. This doesn’t necessarily mean that these websites are all seeing dramatic traffic losses, because they might still have high visibility for keywords that aren’t being tracked. That said, in the couple years that we’ve been reporting on the Penguin and Panda updates, lists from SearchMetrics and a couple other SEO software companies have generally been considered mostly accurate.
In his blog post, SearchMetrics founder Marcus Tober says the impact from this latest Penguin update is smaller than he expected.

It’s not the update I was expecting. I thought that this Googles Penguin update would have had a bigger impact similar to Panda 1. But that didn’t happen. My first analysis shows that many thin sites, sites with thin links and especially untrusted links face the problem. In addition, some small business sites were hit because they haven’t taken SEO serious enough.

He also told us via email that the impact was much stronger in Germany than in the U.S., and SearchMetrics details some of the Penguin-hit websites in Germany in a separate blog post (German language).

SEO Website Audits: Penguin, Panda, Technical

With Google constantly changing their algorithm to eliminate low quality content (Panda Update), sites with structures or metrics that don’t support their large content or product sets or sites that try to manipulate the search results with link schemes or other manipulative tactics (Penguin Update), it is vitally important to do website audits on a regular basis. These audits, much like getting a yearly checkup at your doctor (to combat health issues), can eliminate or minimize the effect of the Google updates on a poorly optimized or site that is not in good health.

To learn more about some of the questions and data points for SEO Audit Process -

1. SEO Technical Analysis -

This analysis will help identify technical (metrics distribution) problems with your website such as duplicate title tags, duplicate content, or if your web pages are returning an incorrect HTTP status code. Below are some more of the data points we check from a technical standpoint to ensure your site is healthy.

• 301 (Permanent) Redirect Analysis
• 302 (Temporary) Redirect Analysis
• 404 (Client Error) Errors
• 500 (Server Error) Errors
• Pages Where The Title is Missing or Empty
• Duplicate Page Content Analysis
• Duplicate Page Title Analysis
• Pages That have Long URLs (> 115 characters)
• Overly-Dynamic URL Analysis
• Meta Refresh Analysis
• Pages Where the Title Element is Too Short
• Pages Where the Title Element is Too Long (> 70 Characters)
• Pages Containing Too Many On-Page Links
• Missing Meta Description Tag Analysis
• Robots.txt Analysis
• Meta-robots Nofollow Analysis
• Meta-robots Analysis
• Canonical Tags Analysis
• Indexed URLs Analysis
• Total URLs Receiving Traffic
• Total Keywords Sending Traffic

2. Content Analysis and Panda Audit

Quality content is one of the primary assets your website has when it comes to competing in the search engines for rankings. We conduct the 4 major audits listed below.

• Panda Update Analysis
• Duplicate Content Analysis
• Keyword Analysis

We recently added the Panda Update Analysis after the recent launch of the Panda Update to the Google Algorithm. This analysis combs over your content sets and asks a set of questions to assess the quality and value your content provides. This audit assess if our content is at risk of being devalued by the search engines and caught in the Panda Update. A few of the questions we ask are listed below.

• Would you trust the information presented here?
• Does this article have obvious errors?
• Does this article provide additional information beyond what others are saying, and does it present it in a unique way.
• Does this article contain insightful analysis?
• Is this article written by an expert?
• Would you expect to see this article in print?
• Would you give this site your credit card?
• Would you trust medical (replace medical information with your vertical’s information) information from this site.

3. Competitive, Link Analysis and Penguin Update Analysis

This is one of the most important audits for your site since it will uncover keyword ranking issues, possible issues that caused your site to get penalized with the Penguin (Over-optimization) penalty, and who your true online competitive is within the search engines organic search results.

• Identify low value links pointing to your website
• Real Online Competition (usually not who you think)
• Keyword Competition
• Competitive Link Audit
• Export of Your Competitions Link Graph
• Competitive Keyword Difficulty Audit

4. Site Architecture Analysis

The marketing campaigns you are running will drive people to link to your website and share it socially. Your site acquires links, link juice, and social metrics from these campaigns and distributes those metrics internally though the site’s link structure. After we assess the technical parts of your website we want to also make sure that your websites architecture is valuable for metrics distribution.

• Structural Analysis
• Page Rank Flow Analysis
• Internal Anchor Text Analysis

Google Disavow Link Threats?

It is no surprise to many that more and more SEOs are using the Google link disavow tool. The issue that comes up as time goes on is that there are some using it as a threat to remove or change the links or anchor text pointing to their site.
 
I am sure some of you have received it. SEOs or other webmasters may email you saying, hey - you are linking to me on this or that page using this link and this anchor text. You have a couple options, either remove the link or change the anchor text to X. If you do not do it within Y days, we will use the Google disavow link tool.
They may add onto that email that using the tool can make your site look bad in Google's eyes. Yada yada.

If you believe Google, Google said the disavow tool won't damage the sites in the list. It simply will just ignore the URLs, as if they are nofollowed. Now, of course, that can change. Aaron Wall thinks himself it will change and Google can use two data points (1) sites frequently disavowed and (2) sites with links frequently removed. Future thought but right now, nope.

That being said, this is causing a big problem in the industry - despite SEOs asking for it.

Google Penalized One Article On BBC’s Web Site

Google did end commenting on why the BBC received an unnatural link notification despite offering us a “no comment” on our story this past Friday.
Was the BBC penalized for unnatural links? Was it possible that the world’s largest news organization was not trusted by Google’s algorithms? The answer is, only one article was penalized.
John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland, said in a Google Help thread:

Looking into the details here, what happened was that we found unnatural links to an individual article, and took a granular action based on that. This is not negatively affecting the rest of your website on a whole.

As you can see, Google will penalize a specific webpage, specific section of a website or even the whole site.
In this case, it seems as if Google only took action on a specific article and not the whole website.

Google’s Matt Cutts On Upcoming Penguin, Panda & Link Networks Updates

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced new updates with Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms and new link network targets in 2013. Matt announced this during the SMX West panel, The Search Police.

Significant Penguin Update

Matt said that there will be a large Penguin update in 2013 that he thinks will be one of the more talked about Google algorithm updates this year. Google’s search quality team is working on a major update to the Penguin algorithm, which Cutts called very significant.
The last Penguin update we have on record was Penguin 3 in October 2012. Before that, we had Penguin 2 in May 2012 and the initial release in April.
So, expect a major Penguin release that may send ripples through the SEO industry this year.

A Panda Update Coming This Friday Or Monday

Matt also announced there will be a Panda algorithm update this coming Friday (March 16th) or Monday (March 18th). The last Panda update was version 24 on January 22nd, which is one of the longer spans of time between Panda refreshes we’ve seen in a long time.

Another Link Network Targeted

Matt Cutts confirmed that Google targeted a link network a couple weeks ago and said Google will go after more in 2013. In fact, Matt said that they will release another update in the next week or two that specifically targets another large link network.

Google Penalizes Another Link Network: SAPE Links

The rumors floating around the SEO industry right now is that Google has crushed yet another link network. SAPE links, a link network I honestly never heard of, was the target this time. Any of those using SAPE links were supposedly penalized and downgraded in their rankings over the past 24 hours or so.

We have dozens of threads about downgrades of Google rankings but the black hat SEO forums all seem to point at SAPE Links as the cause.


Black Hat World and Black Hat Group both seem convinced the reason for the downgrade in rankings in Google yesterday was due to having links from SAPE links.

However, others are not sure if it is specific to SAPE or some other link network.

There is clearly something going on, it doesn't seem to be an algorithmic update but it does seem to be a targeted penalty attacking specific link networks and the sites/webmasters that use them.

Here is a list of threads that are complaining about ranking declines at Google Webmaster Help.
A tweet from about a month ago from Google's Matt Cutts kind of supports this. SAPE Links is a Russian link network:



Matt Cutts         @mattcutts

@dannysullivan @seocom just another day at the office for me. :) Okay, gotta look at some really naughty Russian link selling software now.

Types Of Google Webmaster Notifications

Matt Cutts of Google posted an interested video on YouTube that shared the types of Google Webmaster Tools notifications they send out.
Google sends out hundreds of thousands of notifications each month and 90% of those are black hat related, which we knew already. But how about the rest?

• Black hat notifications is ~90%
• Low or no quality content is ~4%
• Hacking is ~3%
• Buying links is ~2%
• Selling links is ~1%

Here is the video:

It is funny because I call out a Googler for the 4% on Google+ and then he calls me out for the 2% for dropping the link to the source. Good times.

Google Cutts: Links From Press Releases Won't Help

An old fashion and sometimes often used method today, to get links to your web site, is to use press releases with embedded links in those releases.

So you'd contract a press release distribution company and make sure that the content of the release have links to your web site. That release would hopefully be syndicated by other news outlets and those outlets will keep the links intact.

Matt Cutts of Google said in a Google Webmaster Help forums that links from press releases shouldn't have a positive impact on your rankings.

Now, when you do press releases, it might get your web site in front of the eyes of bloggers, reporters and others, where what they write or link to may have an impact on your rankings. But the links within the releases themselves, Google says - they won't benefit your rankings.

Its a Very interesting posting by Matt on the help forums, however I think it may confuse some people. Matt isn't saying that press releases won't help. What Matt is saying is that press releases that are posted to press release sites without getting picked up by real news sites won't help. He's saying: links from press release sites won't help your rankings.

So what do you do? Still do press releases, but make them newsworthy enough to get picked up by news sites. Getting links from industry news sites that have a long history (3 or more years old) are great links to get.